Then your business might soon just be someone else’s football and you may become nothing more than their pawn

Just because business is only just beginning to realise that serious gamification (turning everything you get your clients to do into a kind of game) can work, doesn’t mean that you can afford to just sit back and wait for the results

To bring yourself up to date on the rapidly burgeoning practice of gamification you need to watch what is undoubtedly becoming a ‘seminal video’ on the subject of ‘introducing game mechanics into things other than games’ which is a presentation (widely described as mind-blowing) by Jesse Schell.

Now that you’ve been swept away by Jesse’s tsunami, it’s time for a more calm and detached examination of the current state of the gamification art

Jesse is also the CEO of Pittsburgh’s largest videogame studio, Schell Games, and the former chairman of the International Game Developers Association.

In 2004, he was named one of the world’s Top 100 Young Innovators by Technology Review, MIT’s magazine of innovation.

Before coming to Carnegie Mellon, he was the Creative Director of the Disney Virtual Reality Studio, where he spent seven years as designer, programmer and manager on several projects for Disney theme parks and Disney Online.

Before that, he was a software engineer at IBM and Bell Communications Research, and a writer, director, performer, juggler, comedian, and circus artist for both Jesse Schell founded Schell Games in 2002 and has offices in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania and Austin, Texas.

Jesse Schell has taught Game Design and led research projects at Carnegie Mellon’s Entertainment Technology Center since 2002.

Game philosophers

The names of those in the game business who transcend the limits of game development and have ultimately become respected as ‘game philosophers’ are all familiar to the web tech community:

Before coming to Carnegie Mellon, he was the Creative Director of the Disney Virtual Reality Studio, where he spent seven years as designer, programmer and manager on several projects for Disney theme parks and Disney Online.

Before that, he was a software engineer at IBM and Bell Communications Research, and a writer, director, performer, juggler, comedian, and circus artist for both Freihofer’s Mime Circus and the Juggler’s Guild.

And if your appetite for further insight into the prospects for gamification has been whetted, here’s one more video.

I’ve left it until last, because although it has more Jesse Schell, it has the following characteristics which prompted me to put the requirement for putting the ’round table’ video before it:

It has a long introduction before you get to the part with Jesse’s presentation

There is a superb film which is also shown before Jesse’s bit (so I wanted to get the ‘educational’ material about gamification which was in the round table discussion dealt with before giving you the ‘entertainment’)

The first part of Jesse’s session is actually mostly a recap of the presentation given in the first video. Nonetheless it is still very much worth watching this recap, because it includes updates on that (now iconic) ‘first showing’, which incorporate fascinating ‘audience reactions’ and salutary ‘lessons learned’ in a way which in practice unquestionably renders this utterly exemplary in terms of ‘how to follow-up presentations’